DokuFest Announces Its Program

”More than 100 wonderful documentary films as well as a great array of short fictions and experimental cinema representing 40 countries, is what characterizes the film competition…”, are words from the press release sent out a couple of days ago by the festival in Prizren Kosovo, that takes place August 2-10. The artistic director of the festival, Veton Nurkollari, is a happy man:

“Bold and innovative, timely and important, is how I’d identify many of the films from this year’s competitions. “DokuFest continues its mission to bringing the best and the brightest in contemporary filmmaking to Kosovo and we are thrilled to welcome a number of first-time directors as well as many returning ones to the festival.”

There are no less than six competition sections: Balkan Dox, Intl. Dox and Feature & Shorts, Intl. Shorts, Human Rights Dox, Green Dox, National Competition.

Several of the films have been highlighted on this site, let me mention five of them:

Artemio Benki: Solo – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4542/

Reetta Huhtanen: Gods of Molenbeek – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4454/

Rachel Leah Jones & Philippe Bellaiche : Advocate http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4553/

Dina Naser: Tiny Souls – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4543/

Viktor Kossakovsky: Aquarela – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4408/

As usual, the festival in Prizren offers high quality – and I can add that the festival atmosphere is friendly and relaxed with much time to digest and discuss what you have seen.

https://dokufest.com/2019/

Ksenia Okhapkina: Immortal

This film had its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary Festival that ends tomorrow, July 6. It has had three screenings, and let me start this review of a film, that will conclude with the highest marks on this site by quoting the catalogue text of the festival:

” How do the mechanisms of political power directly influence the lives of a country’s inhabitants? In seeking an answer to this difficult question, this cinematic essay looks at everyday life in a small Russian industrial city, uncovering along the way how dangerous and furtive an all-permeating ideology can be.”

… saying that there is nothing wrong in the text, it is also about indoctrination and building up patriotism, but not about everyday life, the text is a simplification that makes you think that here comes another social documentary from Russia, one of the many that fills festival programs all over. No, this is Cinema far away from information and much closer to interpretation of human life through sound and image and editing and point of view. It is seldom that I see a film that so precisely invites you into a world conveyed via symbols and sequences that has a flow of scary beauty that hits your eyes. Russian Sergey Dvortsevoy once said that for him every image, every sequence must have energy – in Ksenia Okhapkina’s film this is the case. The film is a composition, you are linked to the film with your eyes and ears, it is brilliant.

It takes place in the area, where there used to be Gulag camps and where there now live people, where coal is transported in containers attached to trains in an Arctic landscape, where the ice is burnt away from the pavement and where kids are trained to use rifles, girls are doing ballet and march – 1,2,3,4 – and where a golden tree stands with appartment buildings in the background. Where pilot training is talked about in a museum of heroes, who died for the Fatherland. You have a focus on kids listening and watching a propaganda film, where we the audience hear the sentence “the path to immortality”. Hence the title. Where people are filmed like shadows from behind, they are anonymous individuals, who have given up… no let me refrain from my interpretations to avoid simplifications… in a film that has the total ambition to let the images and the sound speak for what you take from it. Don’t say it, show it! And yet the lonely snow-covered dog barking represents of course, what the director and her excellent crew of camerapersons and editors and sound people and composers want to tell the audience, bringing with extraordinary cinematic skills a tone and a point of view the film to a thematically existential level. As did Pirjo Honkasalo years ago with her “Three Rooms of Melancholy”. It’s in that category, wrote the overwhelmed Danish reviewer.

Estonia/Latvia, 2019, 60 mins.

Daniel Rosenfeld: The Years of the Shark

Det bliver en kort anmeldelse, nærmere en opfordring til danske læsere: Gå i Grand Teatret i København og nyd 94 minutter med den formidable argentinske bandoneónist Astor Piazzolla. En portrætfilm som Daniel Rosenfeld har lavet i samarbejde med Daniel Piazzolla, som har givet instruktøren adgang til et vidunderligt privatarkiv, som sammen med koncertoptagelser bringer tilskueren tæt på kunstneren og lader os forstå, hvorfor han fornyede, mange siger revolutionerede, tangomusikken med sin bandonéon, og hvorfor han i Gardel’s hjemland mødte modstand, også når han insisterede på at tango ikke ”blot” var dansemusik.

Det er smukt, det er melankolsk, det er voldsomt, det er temperament og det er et liv, som følges fra barndommen i New York til Argentina og frem og tilbage mellem hjemlandet og New York og med mange ture til Europa, specielt til Frankrig, hvor han blev og stadig er værdsat. Det er ren forførelse når Piazzolla sætter sin bandonéon på knæet og fylder rummet med poesi.

En flot film med en kompliceret kunstner fortalt via sønnen Daniel.  

Argentina, France, 94 mins., 2018

http://www.piazzolla.org/

Marco Gastine: As Far as the Sea

It’s a strong piece of observational public service documentary, Greek/French director Marco Gastine has made. “Public Service” reminding us about, what legendary Scottish John Grierson thought should be the role of documentaries: to make the audience, the civil society understand the importance of public institutions. In this case the K.A.T. hospital in Athens Greece, where a section is treating patients, who have experienced serious accidents, paraplegics. But Grierson also stressed that these documentaries, apart from having an informative goal, should be made by filmmakers with a creative and artistic interpretation.

For 108 minutes the film takes the audience to the hospital with the staff and

the patients and those, who are close to them. Parents, friends, relatives. It’s about the continuous efforts from both sides to improve the patients mobility, it’s about « try, try, and try again”, training to operate a wheelchair, to get to the next step, the walker and from there to the crutches. And it is about to be able to cope with everyday life again, with all the mental obstacles that also have to be overcome.

And it is about the staff and their meetings discussing the patients, their disagreements, their rounds to talk to (they are all male) the men, the optimistic small remarks, testing and celebrating the small steps forward…

And it is about catching the moments of joy as when the lead doctor, who has been at the hospital for 39 years goes on pension and makes a party for everyone. Or when friendships are made between the patients with remarks like “be strong, the battle is not over yet”. The film has a strong emotional impact because of these scenes.

And, five months later, a text says, Giorgis graduates in economy and comes to the stage in a wheelchair – he was the one who had his accident when diving not taking enough notice of how deep the water was. Stavros fights to learn to walk, Agis is in the swimming pool (wonderful images under water), gets out, walks to the car with crutches, pass these to his father and takes the driver’s seat in the car. Not all of them get that far in their effort to gain Independence but less is more.

Greece, France, 2019, 108 mins.

Laila Pakalnina: Spoon

… her 65 minutes long documentary has its premiere in Karlovy Vary tonight. The play- and colourful Latvian director is very busy on Facebook, where she for a long time has posted great photos, the last couple of days also from Karlovy Vary, where she is with her cinematographer. She is one of few veteran directors, who is always able to surprise the audience.

In an interview before the premiere at the festival’s documentary competition, the director said to ScreenDaily’s Laurence Boyce : « The first important thing to understand was not where to film but with whom to film. It was a very important decision to work with cinematographer Gints Berzins with whom I’d studied with at Moscow Film School (VGIK). We had created our common understanding about what film is and made many films together. »

… a guarantee for something special, which she already promised us at the Baltic Sea Docs pitch in 2017, where she showed stunning images created by Berzins and by the way also, as the show-woman she can be, threw plastic spoons to the panelists at the table. Berzins has also made several films with another Latvian director, Viesturs Kairiss, where the camerawork is far from mainstream.

« (the dialogue-free film is) a deceptively simple affair in which Pakalnina charts the creation of a meagre plastic spoon. But within this simplicity lies a nuanced commentary on both the wastefulness of human society and the magnificent spectacle of human endeavour. »

Looking forward to see the film on a big screen somewhere at a festival or in Riga in September ?

Beniamino Barrese: The Disappearance of My Mother

This film that I first got to watch yesterday having heard and read about it, only positive words… Here is the annotation from IDFA’s Docs for Sale:

“Benedetta (Barrese) wants to disappear. An iconic fashion model in the 1960s, she became a muse to Warhol, Dali & Penn and Avedon. As a radical feminist in the 1970s, she fought for the rights and emancipation of women. A fight against the manipulating world of images and against her son’s camera, who filmed her since he was a child, despite her resistance.”

And in the CinéDoc Festival in Tbilisi, where I was in the Caucasus jury, the international jury gave the film the main award with the following motivation:

“This film openly talks about respect, dignity, beauty and honesty. The film makes us think about how we treat privacy and who has the right to use it, which is a very important question for any documentary film. An emotional insight into a relationship between mother and son.”

And yet, why is it that I am disappointed with the film. Too high expectations? Maybe. But also because I got the impression of an insecure director, who took one path of storytelling and then went for another one and then and then… He starts by casting beautiful young women asking them to pose, having a beauty spot placed on the right chin. Which is what his mother has, his now old mother who still has a remarkable face and a charisma significant from all the great archive material in the film. BUT the film is about a mother, who wants to get away from the camera and who wants to have her son Ben to put down the camera to she can be with Ben.

As the jury in Tbilisi indirectly formulates it : she has the right to the privacy that he, the son and filmmaker, abuses constantly. Instead he has chosen to have a little bit of everything, creating her biography via archive and reconstruction of her as young – where a stronger focus on her wanting to disappear, to sum up her life, put it in boxes and be together with her son would have been much more interesting. Intimate conversations on life and opinions…

Italy, 2019, 90 mins.

https://www.thedisappearanceofmymother.com/welcome

Joris Ivens

“The film screen is not a window through which you look at the world, it is a world in itself.”

DAFilms.com presents yet another documentary film classic, Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. Recall his works from the golden collection of European cinema. Watch his films from the 1960s following his travels across the world: “17th Parallel” directly from the Vietnam War, “A Valparaíso” and “Le petit chapiteau” from Latin America’s Chile, and “Rotterdam Europort” painting a portrait of a city in his native Netherlands.

Set out on a documentary journey with globetrotter Joris Ivens!

www.dafilms.com

Ai Weiwei on Documentary

The BFI Doc Society publishes a very good newsletter. In the one I received yesterday, there was a text about the presence of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, whose last film ”The Rest” was screened at the Sheffield Documentary Festival. He was interviewed by Jess Search, here is a bit of what he said about documentary:

“Documentary is always a challenge. it’s very close range. If it’s fighting, it’s like boxing. You have to take all those punches and you have to feel the pain… and about the medium… “You cannot hide, you expose yourself and also you have no excuse about any mistakes. So I love it because it’s so truthful and clear and direct. It’s a very honest form, as honest as it can get. So that’s why it attracts me so much. Because it requires observation, understanding and passion, it requires a lot of passion.“

His previous documentary, edited by Danish Niels Pagh Andersen, « Human Flow », was praised on this site:

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4066/

Images

At the first session of the Ex Oriente the directors taking part were asked to write a text “I am your character” in a couple of hours. I used the two hours before meeting the directors with their texts to write about some images that stayed on my mind from what I had seen. For you readers I have made some notes below so you know just a little bit of what I am talking about. Here is my small image-poetry:

The view from my hotel window.

Three angles, the church next door, the green and more green, the man packing his car. For a Sunday drive ?

Football – Dani Alves making a great goal on my apple computer last night, they say he is 36 years, no no, he is young as ever. 1)

Football without ball. Jan Gogolas clip with the kids, who are bored of the match going on, talking about the teeth that they are losing and getting…

The intellectuals as Gogola called them in conversation about Vaclav Klaus breaking a pen somewhere far away from the stadion. 2)

… and the little boy crawling into a cupboard or whatever it is in the flat in Pilsen. Unforgettable. 3)

Cut to the people looking into the kiosk, to Ania, the mother of everyone in the Polish town, a man giving her flower, you are beautiful he says. 4)

Love

the mother in Belarus, who has a mission, she cares, she travels her country to fight the

dedovschina

magic word to say, terrible meaning 5)

and this morning the clips from Israel, the Palestinians having their eyes covered, cut to corpses, the boots of dead men and a boy who is in jail because he is addicted to the internet, gosh ! 6)

and the small Roma in Maidan, no-one wants him but for the director Olga PHOTO (by Daniel Svoren) who sits next to him, she cares, she is a hero, is he a lost soul 7)

as maybe also Jesse from Canada is, coming back to hug her mother in Romania and to meet her father,

where do I belong, here or there or everywhere 8)

everywhere,

the world is ours as Lubo and Laco visualise, let the music and the poetry take us to Manhattan and to the streets of Paris, with or without teeth 9)

all is possible, there are no limits, if you want to send a message, use the post office, if you want say something, use the image, make

a composition that is your own, put your heart into it, learn from

Rembrandt, Brueghel, Tarkovski, Truffaut, Coutard, Sokurov, Hanak!!!

Notes:

  1. Copa America, Bresil – Qatar 5-0
  2. Film 2-0 by Pavel Abraham, 2012
  3. Project by Jaroslav Kratochvil: Comfortable Century
  4. Project by Daniel Stopa: Women in Kiosk, Staron Film
  5. Project by Anna Bodyako & Alexander Mihalkovich: The Mothers´Crusade
  6. Israeli producer Hilla Medalia showed strong clips from “Uncensored Voices” and the Chinese internet-film
  7. Project by Olga Zhurba: Roma, producers Viktoria Khomenko and Darya Bassel
  8. Project by Laurentiu Garofeanu: Lost and Found
  9. Film Steam on the River by Kirchhoff and Remunda, 2015

Ex Oriente First Session 2019

… with the subtitle ”Find Your Way – Vision – Space and Storytelling” here in Banská Stiavnoca in Slovakia – is going to its end. Two more program points, exiting both of them, and then a summing up tomorrow. First one: I have just listened to Bosnian director Alen Drljevic talk about his “Men don’t Cry” that we saw yesterday, a fiction film with a documentary background on a group therapy session with former soldiers in the different armies during the Yugoslav war.  

I am writing this in the cinema, where I am to watch ”Forman vs. Forman”, a private screening for the Ex Oriente participants of the film by Jakub Hejna and Helena Trestikova, the film about Milos Forman that premiered in Cannes and has its Czech premiere at the upcoming Karlovy Vary Film Festival. I just saw a clip of the master, he will be on screen in half an hour…

The Ex Oriente workshop is perfectly organised by the IDF staff (Institute of Documentary Film). There is the right balance between the discussion of the 12 selected projects and the lectures, or call them interventions, on production and visualisation AND screenings of full films and clips and comments. I have in previous posts written about Jan Gogola and Robo and Filo (Robert Kirchhoff and Filip Remunda) and their jazz-film, which is much more than a jazz film and with this post I would like to draw your attention to

Dalia Neis (PHOTO), multi-artist from London, living in Berlin. She came up with an inspiring talk full of surprises called “Spectral Glitches, Eerie Terrains & The Unfilmable”. She took us to a clip by Joris Ivens, “Pour le Mistral” from 1966, where he was filming the unfilmable, and to a clip from American Kuca (? Did not get the name, sorry), who had another approach to filming the wind – Neis is publishing a book on The Wind, that comes out in September. She then showed us her own film, Jewish theme, shot in Krakow, experimental “Missing Meilich” from 2004, supported by Carré Noir of RTBF, at the days where there was a commissioning editor, who was allowed to take chances, Christiane Philippe. Who I remember from my EDN-time and many pitching sessions. Neis said that she found out that she had to go for another medium, and she did, telling us about her interest in sound – “how a soundtrack can represent a reality that we can´t see”. She has published sound tapes and one that she let us listen to had been picked up the filmmaker Tatia Shé, named “Biolystok”, around 4 minutes long. Neis quoted a lot of philosophers and introduced a terminology connected to some of them – I did not get it on this occasion but I will definitely follow her work. To get a bit away from the documentary, sometimes good for your health.

Back to Jan Gogola, who seems to be involved in most of the significant Czech and Slovak documentaries. And you sense it, when the directors of these films talk like him about dramaturgy and exposition and what do I know, not to forget his “open structure” ideas that took me years to understand, until I saw the films of Peter Kerekes, “66 Seasons” and “Cooking History”. Gogola had a brilliant session called “Something Else”, which it was, indeed. He showed, and analysed scenes from Vit Klusak’s “The World According to Daliborek”, “2-0” by Abraham, with fantastic scenes from a football stadion where there is a focus on what happens outside the pitch – two kids talking about the teeth that they have or are about to fall out, intellectuals in conversation about former president Vaclav Klaus behaving badly abroad, a film that portrays a society and many many more clips, including one from the “Forman vs Forman” documentary, I was waiting for, while writing this.

And there it came on the screen, a coproduction with arte by Czech Television, with production houses Negative from Prague and Alegria from Paris. A well made biography with wonderful archive with the director, who left his country for political reasons, made himself a great career in the US, went back to film “Amadeus” in Prague under strict surveillance and again back in 1989 to celebrate with his friend Vaclav Havel and the people of Czekoslovakia. With clips from his films, of course, I have seen them all. Wonderful to be reminded of. In one scene where he is watching on television “Amadeus”, he says that he feels like Salieri in comparison with Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti… well, a man who left us The Firemen’s Ball, Loves of A Blonde, One Flew Over…, Amadeus, Hair… has nothing to regret!

www.dokweb.net